11/30/2009 @ 6:00PM

Carbon Stickers For Buildings

We have a lot to learn from the automobile industry. At any car dealer, every car has a sticker that tells you its fuel consumption and how it relates to its peers.

The sticker is also an effective policy mechanism for controlling the overall fuel consumption of all cars, and hence their carbon emissions. By simply raising the fleet averages, the U.S. government was able to double new car fuel efficiency between 1975 and 1985. In May 2009, President Obama raised the average for cars and light trucks again. This could save 900 million metric tons of carbon by 2016–the equivalent of shutting down 194 coal-fired power generators.

Why don’t we do the same for buildings? Buildings account for around 40% of total carbon emissions in North America, while SUVs account for just 3%. Imagine the impact if we could put an efficiency sticker on buildings and halve their emissions over 10 years. Cutting building emissions in half would save 1.14 billion tons of carbon in the U.S. in one year alone.

We know very little about the energy efficiency of our buildings, and there is no overall benchmark for building performance. Nothing tells a city or government authority what the ‘fleet average’ performance of its buildings is. Without this information, we don’t have a policy lever to reduce building carbon emissions the way we can with cars.

We can change this. We have the tools to measure and calculate not only carbon emissions, but also water usage and total energy usage. We can introduce a program to measure every building’s performance and give it an efficiency sticker. Once a city has measured all its buildings, it can calculate their average–in terms of footprint per square meter of floor space.

Let’s say that, in terms of carbon, a city ends up with a figure of 50 kilograms of carbon per square meter on average. The government could then mandate that all cities in its jurisdiction must achieve a target of 40 kilograms of carbon per square meter within five years–a 20% reduction. It could do the same with water and total energy, to get an overall footprint reduction.

With new buildings, a city can simply mandate high levels of efficiency. If it has a stock of old buildings that are particularly difficult to improve, it might set the bar for new buildings even higher in order to compensate.

The national government doesn’t need to know anything about the particulars of a city’s buildings, nor does it need to set specific targets for specific building types. All it needs to do is set the overall benchmark–the average footprint (comprising carbon, water and total energy)–and leave it to the individual cities to use their knowledge of their building stock, and their skills and ingenuity to meet the target.

The same footprint sticker and benchmark average methodology could be applied to residential buildings. If every house had a sticker on the front, you would be able to compare the carbon ratings and energy performance when you were deciding on buying a new home. Neighbors would also be able to see how they performed compared with each other.

We are already some steps down this road. President Obama has set a goal of making all U.S. buildings carbon neutral or have zero emissions by 2030. The U.K. and other countries now require houses to be energy rated when they are put up for sale. Building footprint stickers and city building stock averages would create a powerful policy tool to drive down emissions from buildings and make substantial global carbon savings.

Zerofootprint–the consultancy I founded–is currently in the process of rolling out a sticker program to hundreds of buildings on a voluntary basis, using our benchmarking software and our environmental footprinting engine.

Auto designers have made great progress in reducing how much cars pollute. The Honda Civic pollutes 100 times less now than it did 30 years ago. We have the tools to do the same with buildings. We just need to use them. Then perhaps we can get a 100-fold improvement in the operating efficiency of our buildings, too.

Ron Dembo is founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, which provides software and services to governments, corporations and universities that measure and manage their carbon footprint, and engages people in combating climate change.